The treatment of seeds with insecticides and fungicides is widely used to control pests and diseases that attack the seeds. This process is normally done before the seeds are planted. It is normally done away from the seed meter or the reservoir of the seed planter, in a mechanical or manual way.
Now, the treatment process using inoculant in the seeds is carried out since the inoculated bacteria, in symbiosis with the plants, aid in capturing nitrogen from the atmosphere, which greatly saves on the use of fertilizers in farming.
With advances in agro-business and the constant greater need to increase productivity on farms, farming and the planting of seeds is not currently conducted without the previous treatment thereof.
In the case of inoculant comprising live bacteria, it is important that inoculation takes place a few hours before the seeds are planted. This time period can be varied depending on the type of inoculant that is used. When the seeds are not planted during this period, it will become necessary to re-inoculate them.
The inoculation can also be carried out simultaneously with the planting, directly on the crop furrows. When it is done in this way, there is likely to be major waste of the inoculant because it is not being applied just to the seeds. It is being applied to the furrows themselves in a continuous way.
Another factor to be considered is that many of the products used in the treatment of seeds are highly toxic, which have the ability to compromise the health of the people that are applying the product.
What follows are some prior art documents and their disadvantages.
The patent document BR MU7601412-6 shows a device used in the general treatment of grain flows that permits the use of, via liquid, insecticides, fungicides and wettable powder that can be sprayed on cereals and grains in reservoirs in which the grains enter due to gravity under an adjustable thick “curtain.” The grains are jet sprayed from within in an outward direction as well as an inward direction. This takes place in a closed compartment without the inconveniences for the workers provided by traditional systems.
Another patent document is BRMU8701880-2, which describes the seed inoculation device that is used immediately before the seeds are sown by the planting machine. The function is to spray the seeds using an atomizer that reaches the seeds previously disposed in a blanket arrangement inside a chamber, where, due to the fact of being a homogeneous atomization, all of the seeds receive the inoculant liquid that is used to help the seeds' development and to obtain greater harvest yields.
The patent document BR MU8800133-4 illustrates an arrangement applied in a seed inoculator that can be mounted on top of the seeder box or can be supported from the ground, being connected to an electric pump in a mixer. This is then connected to a tractor or lorry that contains the inoculant or insecticide in the reservoir where is it unloaded on the seeds.
Another patent document is BR MU8900413-2, which describes a constructive device used in machines to inoculate seeds that may be mounted on the seeder box in one of the lines to prepare the seeds that will be scattered over the land. It has a container for the inoculant, an electric pump connected to the source of the agricultural machine, pressure controls and controls on the volume spray used on the seeds. It can be easily moved from one planting line to another from the planting machine.
All of the devices that have been described in this document thus far are not directly attached to the planter or the seed meter. Therefore, the requirement is for treatment done beforehand and for additional operations, which may compromise the microbiological life of the inoculant and its effectiveness until the seeds are planted.
The present disclosure describes, in some embodiments, a device for inoculation and treatment of seeds that can be assembled inside the seed meter or the seed reservoir on the planting machine in order to perform the inoculation or treatment of the seeds simultaneously to the planting. This ensures that the inoculation or treatment is done in an efficient way.
What follows is a summary and simplified description of the embodiments described in this disclosure. This summary is not a general extensive vision of all of the embodiments. The intention is not to identify fundamental or critical elements nor is it to outline the scope of all of the embodiments. The main and only aim is to present some concepts of the embodiments described in a simplified way as an introduction and then go into more detail further on in this description.